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‘Mad Men’ Recap: A Fever Dream and Spooky Reality

By Mike Hale April 9, 2012 1:23 amApril 9, 2012 1:23 am

Season 5, Episode 3

Once a generation, “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” — written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King — is rediscovered all over again. The dirge-like Crystals single has always been a pop music outlier, known to girl-group aficionados and Phil Spector completists. After its broadcast over the closing credits in “Mystery Date,” Sunday night’s episode of “Mad Men,” we can brace for a new round of I-can’t-believe-it articles, blog posts and comments. Yes, it’s been right there since 1962.

Whether you consider it shockingly wrongheaded or startlingly ahead of its time, the song was a fitting capstone — perhaps a bit too literal, if anything? — for a tense episode with strange overtones of violence. It was threaded throughout with references to Richard Speck’s killing of eight student nurses in Chicago on July 14, 1966, and to the race riots that had already been going on for two years. The fact that there had been no announcement of an arrest in the murders would appear to place the action somewhere between the 14th and 18th of July. (A reference to a “one year later” magazine cover about the Watts riots, which took place in August 1965, might not seem to jibe, but Life ran a “Watts Still Seething” cover dated July 15, 1966.)

The very first thing we heard was Don Draper coughing, and it wasn’t just any cough, but a raspy, scary, coughing-up-a-lung sound that must have had everyone thinking: lung cancer! That would be poetic, of course, but for now it was just a bad cold that sent Don home and provided the writers an excuse for a fever dream (a pretty obvious one — do you think we were supposed to be fooled?) in which he had sex with a former lover, then strangled her and shoved her under the bed. For some extra spook-show texture, the woman was played by Mädchen Amick of “Twin Peaks.” It was his response to Megan’s continuing insecurity over his slutty history — killing the ghost of conquests past — and when the fever broke, he told her, “You don’t have to worry about me.” Well, except for the part where I have dreams about murdering women I used to work with.

Betty was absent for nearly the entire episode, making room for an expanded role for everyone’s favorite precocious youngster, Sally Draper. (Lucky magazine tweeted during the broadcast, “Why yes, Sally Draper is our spirit animal, thank you for asking.”) Sally is curious about and then frightened by the news of the Chicago murders and her fear leads to a tentative thawing of relations with her stepgrandmother, Pauline. Their new alliance goes a step too far, though, when Pauline helps Sally get to sleep by offering her a Seconal. Betty arrives home to find her mother-in-law passed out on the couch and her daughter asleep on the floor underneath, a state of affairs that will presumably be addressed next week.

The episode’s title was drawn from a moment when Sally watched what appeared o be a TV commercial for Mystery Date, a board game marketed to young girls, while the bloodthirsty Pauline talked avidly on the phone about the Speck murders. If you have any thoughts about the psychosexual currents at work in that scene, please share them in the comments. (And there were other mystery dates in the episode: Don’s imaginary tryst, Peggy and Dawn’s impromptu sleepover.)

The third major strand of the episode was the return from Vietnam of Joan’s Army surgeon husband, Greg. Obviously uncomfortable, completely disengaged from the son he was seeing for the first time, Greg shocked Joan with the news that he was going back to the war not for 40 days, as originally planned, but for a year. He blamed the military, but later his mother let slip that he had volunteered for the extra duty. In the most dramatic moment of the episode — the only dramatic moment of the episode, really, besides Don’s wishful homicide — Joan told him not to come back, and reminded him that he had not always been a good man to her, harking back to the rape in Don’s office. So he is irredeemable, which has always seemed logical. This paves the way for Joan’s full-time return to the firm, of course, and we’d love to hear how you think that will go. I’d also be curious to hear what you thought of the shot that introduced Joan in Sunday’s episode — Christina Hendricks’s cleavage as seen from inside an oven.

Peggy, everyone’s second-favorite precocious youngster, provided a note of comic relief, soaking Roger for $400 in cash when he needed a plan for Mohawk Airlines done over the weekend. Working late, she hears a noise — more shades of Speck — and discovers the new secretary, Dawn, who is black, sleeping at the office. The cabs won’t go north of 96th Street and her brother has ordered her not to take the subway because of the events in Chicago. (When Peggy asks, somewhat oddly, if there’s been another riot — the major rioting in Harlem took place in 1964 — Dawn says there was a “thing” in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Do any of our loyal readers know what that might refer to? It was around the time of a large schools protest that drew Mayor John V. Lindsay to Brooklyn, but that was in Canarsie.)

The ever-kind Peggy offers her couch to Dawn, and commiserates with her about being the person who stands out at the firm. Then came the best and truest moment in the episode, when Peggy, about to head to bed, notices that she’s left her purse on the coffee table in front of Dawn and freezes, not wanting to appear racist by carrying the purse away. Dawn notices, and the awful silence is held for several beats before Peggy retreats, leaving the purse behind. The next morning Dawn has left just as silently, neatly stacking the bedclothes and leaving a chillingly polite note.

Please share your own thoughts and observations about “Mystery Date” in the comments.